P2P streaming applications are becoming commonplace on the PC and it foreseen that they will make their way into networked Consumer Electronic CE devices (e.g. MP3 players, media players etc). P2P streaming applications will also be available on mobile phone devices. Examples of P2P streaming applications are Joost (video) and Spotify (music).
P2P streaming applications work in much the same way as other P2P fileshare clients except that instead of downloading files, the users download streams. These streams are then exchanged in real-time with other users. Depending on implementation, no data might be stored locally on any machine connected to the network.
In these applications, an overlay construction mechanism organizes participating peers into multiple trees. Each peer determines a proper number of trees to join based on its access link bandwidth. To minimize the effect of churn and effectively utilize available resources in the system, participating peers are organized into multiple diverse trees. With diverse trees, each peer is placed as an internal node in only one tree and leaf node in other participating trees. When a peer joins the system, it contacts a bootstrapping server to identify a parent node in the desired number of trees. To keep the population of internal nodes balanced among different trees, a new node is added as an internal node to the tree that has the minimum number of internal nodes. An example of multiple diverse trees can be seen below:

P2P streaming applications are built on either tree-based or meshed based architectures. They differ in the way the peers relate to one another. Specifically in tree based systems the relationship between parent peers and child peers are static and a rigid tree structure is maintained during the system run time. In mesh-based there is no well defined relationship between parent and child peers, participating peers form a randomly connected overlay, or a mesh. In mesh-based systems each peer tries to maintain a certain number of parents (i.e., incoming degree) and also serves a specific number of child peers (i.e., outgoing degree). Upon arrival, a peer contacts a bootstrapping server to receive a set of peers that can potentially serve as parents. The bootstrapping server maintains the outgoing degree of all participating peers. Individual peers periodically report their newly available packets to their child peers and request specific packets from individual parent peers. A parent peer periodically receives an ordered list of requested packets from each child peer, and delivers the packets in the requested order. The requested packets from individual parents are determined by a packet scheduling algorithm at each child peer.
With time, when the business models have been worked out, P2P streaming applications will offer both audio and video. PCs (e.g. laptops) and some Consumer Electronic CE devices can today be connected to the cellular network e.g. via HSPA USB dongles. The behavior of end users has been shown not to change as they switch one access technology to another; hence traffic trends persist to a large extent as users switch from fixed to wireless accesses. It is then very logical to conclude that PCs, CEs and mobile devices will use the cellular network (3G/4G) to run P2P streaming applications in the near future. FIG. 1a shows segments of a 3GPP architecture impacted by P2P traffic. FIG. 1a discloses clients/laptops 2,3,4 within an internet network and clients/laptops 1,5,6 that communicate via Radio Base Stations RBSs within a radio access network that is part of a core network. The architecture of 3GPP mobile networks is built around tunneling. The tunnels are shown in FIG. 1a with dotted lines. In FIG. 1a a signaling gateway 15 acts as a tunnel terminating node and a packet Data Network GateWay 20 is the tunnel ingress/egress point for all internet traffic. All traffic from/to the radio based laptops 1,5,6 will go through 20. FIG. 1b discloses a tree structure according to prior art. In this simplified example content will be streamed S1, S2, S3, S4, S5 from the root of the tree i.e. node 2 in this example, downwards to all nodes in the tree. As can be seen in FIG. 1a traffic will negatively impact the radio access network and the core network. Due to the construction of the tree, content from node 6 to node 1 will be streamed S5 via the signaling gateway 15 and consequently causes extra load to the network. Furthermore, a requirement imposed by P2P systems on operators is that all nodes participating in the P2P system must contribute with their uplink capacity to the P2P network. This will also negatively impact the radio access network and the core network.